The new year greeted our team with a bit of the new and a bit of the old. Parushya and Nikita are continuing to work on the Aamcha Aahar, Aamcha Poshan (AAAP) program, Janey and Rhythm are continuing to work on strategies for implementing waste segregation at the household level. For my part, I’ve been able to cozy up to some of the remarkable people at Swasth Foundation (a medical non-profit) and begin collaborating with them in some small ways.
Though there is considerable crosstalk between the various arms of our project and we all will help out as needed for one workstream or another, I’m going to take this week to do a little spot on what our team has been doing with Swasth Foundation since I met Sundeep Kapila (one of its co-founders) for the first time on December 15th.
To start, for those of you who have never been to Mumbai, do not bother with a photo essay of the city - the dust, the smog, and even the smell are fundamental components of its visual landscape. I’ve become fond of the right angles of food carts, the sides of metal sheeting for improvised rooptops, the bleary yellow sheen that blankets nearly everything once the sun comes up, and frequent coughing preventing me from appreciating any of these for a sustained period of time.
It was after sleeping through one of these sunrises that I consented to taking an Ola-cab to Swasth’s office in Goregaon - I had wanted to take the trains, which would have added an hour to the hour-long trip, but some needling from Parushya convinced me the Uber clone was the best option. So, my first sight of the northern suburb was through the bleary glass of some late 90s compact car.
As we exited the main body of the city and began weaving through the mellow streets and rich fields of Goregaon on our way to Swasth’s office, I really felt like I was leaving the city entirely. The contrast of the slick, startuppy feel of Swasth’s operation and the gorgeous greenery of the surrounding area was incredibly satisfying after months of government offices and shoefulls of dust.
We went into their office building, past a cafe that was blaring the Black Keys into the hallway, and met Sundeep Kapila. A Mckinsey alumnus and savvy co-founder of Swasth India, Sundeep has found a way to make Swasth’s social mission of building a “healthy and resilient India by ensuring health security and equity to all” cost effective. He’s an earnest guy, with deep voice and a penchant for revealing startling depths of knowledge in innocuous conversation. These are perhaps the traits you might expect for someone who has chosen to host his office in a building literally called “Mastermind 1”.
We picked his brain for the AAAP program and got some great advice (e.g. if securing adequate nutrition for workers is the goal, focus on building/branding AAAP as high quality instead of low-cost to avoid the headache of convincing vendors to lower their rates). He also asked us if we would be interested in helping them out with a project: that Swasth has noted elevated rates of diabetes and heart disease amongst their low-income and urban patient pool, and that his team is therefore looking to expand the services and resources they provide to diabetics and that they could use someone to help them build this program.
I volunteered immediately and met Sundeep’s co-worker, Pranay Bhatia, on 28 Dec to learn how I could be of help. Pranay is an intelligent guy, passionate about data and discovering best-practices at both the business and therapeutic end of primary care. He has a knack for figuring out who best to talk to for insight on any sub-topic of his work. As our subsequent work has thus far revealed, the immediate goals for our team in collaboration with Swasth are as follows:
- Help Swasth to structure outreach regarding diabetes both at the primary care level as well as within local communities
- Coordinate to ensure AAAP is both in-line with and benefits from the informational outreach that Swasth is already planning to make regarding nutrition in the context of diabetes and heart disease
- Learn from Swasth’s approach as our team and the broader Mission Garima effort attempts to target resources and interventions towards working-class people in Mumbai
Talking with him, and figuring out in detail what Swasth is looking to do regarding Diabetes (including collaborating with the Poverty Action Lab at Cambridge University), I’m currently working on three documents for Swasth:
- a screening protocol for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) for use in future health camps, encompassing best-practices for risk assessment and usage of diagnostic resources
- a document for patients who have received a confirmatory diagnosis of T2DM, covering home-care protocols and nutritional/lifestyle shifts they can use to manage their disease
- a pamphlet for persons at-risk for T2DM covering useful information and lifestyle advice for preventing a development of their risk status into full-blown disease
The challenge here is to find a way to simplify the depth of an internationally-solicited body of knowledge into chunks for the lay population, and further finding ways to express this in a way that is most meaningful to the incredibly diverse cultural context of Mumbai.
This is super interesting work and I’m happy to be a part of it. I do sometimes feel a bit underqualified, though. These are real people’s lives we’re dealing with, after all, and the fact of it hits me a bit harder when I’m doing medical-related work. I voiced this concern and he, literally immediately, responded “try and not worry about qualifications for now, just focus on the evidence” before waxing poetic on how sometimes the most experienced industry professionals can be the most blind to what the data really shows as far as successful.
So, yeah. That’s the kind of person that our team has had the privilege to meet in our work under the IIC. It’s exciting stuff, I’m happy to be here, and all I ask is that I manage to work hard enough to justify the opportunity being given to me.
